There might be a generational aspect at play - I got my Spectrum in 1986, a post-Sinclair grey +2 model, so I've always thought of anything pre-1986 as belonging to the primitive dark ages. S&S stands out because it's unusually sophisticated for the period. I didn't realise it had a following, albeit a brief one.bluespikey wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 9:13 am Swords and Sorcery had a dedicated fan section in the letters of the adventure bit of Crash for a while, and Chaos had a brief revival in the strategy bit after a couple of years. So people were playing it during the original release and the more famous yellow YS cover tape.
This thread lit a small spark in my mind. There was a detective game. I remember it being fun, but beyond the initial release it seemed to vanish. What was it? I popped open the Internet Archive's Your Sinclair archive and looked through some old back issues of YS. June 1987. The second issue I bought, with Hydrofool on the cover.
An lo, on page 80 an advert for Killed Until Dead. If the database is to believed it was released at full price in 1987 and never re-released on budget or put on a covertape or a compilation, so if you missed it when it was new you missed it. It's one of those icon-driven logic puzzle games like The Fourth Protocol or Vera Cruz etc but with a more comic tone. I remember almost nothing about it. The "Murder at Midnight" subtitle on the title screen implies it was the first in a planned series. It would probably have been more successful if they had managed to get a suitable licence albeit that it's an odd mixture of techno-sleuthing and old-fashioned Poirot-style politeness. There's a surprisingly thorough blog post about it here:
http://frgcb.blogspot.com/2014/10/kille ... -1986.html
But again it's one of those games that doesn't get talked about a lot. I have no idea how many copies it sold. It was released on a bunch of different formats (C64, then Apple II, then ZX Spectrum / Amstrad) so obviously somebody believed in it.
